I've been trying to find a quote I'm not ashamed to admit I read on Pinterest. It said something like, "Someday I'll write a book after I read a whole one." I laughed when I read it then quickly returned to FaceBook when I realized it was talking about me. Seriously, though, the book I'm writing in my mind is called "The Other Side of the Table: a glimpse into the Contemporary Christian Music Industry." (The tag line isn't perfected yet, but I'm digging "The Other Side of the Table," sounds like a contemporary version of "The Prince and the Pauper.") By the way this blog serves as the proof of my intellectual property. Don't steal it.
Anyway, being on staff at Grace has given me so many awesome opportunities to develop numerous ministries and try new things. One big project of this fall was hosting an inaugural concert and we brought in For King and Country and Future of Forestry. After much deliberation we named our fall concert series, "Shaken" which is Hebrew for, to rest or dwell. I designed this series of concert posters.
I printed a 5'x8' poster of this this on our printer in the office in series of 12"x18" glossy paper and it turned out really well. For any future events that I need signage for in Michiana, I'll use PAC BannerWorks. They will print a vinyl poster like this for $65 which I thought was a great price.
I did a FaceBook promotion where people could turn their profile pic to this icon for their chance to win two free tickets.
On the recommendation of a good friend I used iTickets.com for my online ticket sales and ticket printing. For $75 I had 400 physical tickets printed and they had excellent customer service. I would highly recommend them, too.
When these showed up in the mail I realized there was no going back - we were locked in.
I was so impressed with the response I got with this add I ran in our service pre-roll announcements. I speculated that I'd need 30 volunteers for various positions and within a week I was turning volunteers away. Just so you know, in a church like ours this is very rare. In my one year tenure in church ministry I'm realizing this is something people don't line up to do: sign up to help with stuff.
I wanted our concert staff to feel official and have matching staff T's so I did mock of this:
It would have cost me $5/shirt from WalMart and then I would have had to iron on logos which did not sound fun...so even after calling all of my merch providers I used when in 33Miles I went with a company out of Ohio named Blu Dot that was recommended by a friend. Evidently "special location" on shirts costs extras, so they printed these for $8/shirt. Worth it to me!
There is so much that goes into concert promotion - I now have so much more respect for concert promoters that I worked with from an artist side in my previous life. The artists we hosted were happy. I covered my bases and took good care of them. While administrating and organizing and putting together all of the details was time consuming it wasn't impossible and it showed me that promoters can do a great job and knock a concert out of the park if they want to, they just need to try!
More on concert riders next time.
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